Airbnb has been actively expanding its business model, developing its Services and Experiences verticals and leaning further into hotels.
And according to CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky, from a top-line perspective, category expansion and international presence are key for growth.
"You’re going to see a lot of vertical expansion, and every month you’ll see an acceleration in new verticals launching. That’s number one, category expansion," he said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference on Tuesday.
When it comes to improving margin, seller services may offer the biggest monetization opportunity.
"If you think about Amazon, if you think about Alibaba, you think about Etsy, you think about many of these marketplaces, they take a huge margin on the supply side. I think there [are] a lot of different services we can sell to hosts," Chesky said.
Sponsored listings are the "obvious" route, he said. Earlier this month, Vrbo also recently launched sponsored listings as part of broader product release.
"This is a pretty easy straight shot to $1 billion incremental high margin revenue, based on what other brands have done. I think even that is just part of a platter of host services," Chesky said, also pointing to Airbnb's travel insurance product.
Chesky also spoke more on artificial intelligence (AI), arguing that it has yet to significantly improve the lives of consumers.
"If you think about the consumer, there has been almost no change to daily life in four years. AI has not changed the world, not even come close," he said. "It has changed how companies do business. It has changed how investors invest."
Chesky said he's "bullish on AI," asserting that most of the tech's value yet to be created.
"I do not know when this consumer revolution happens. I think it is the next 18 months to 24 months. I think we are going to see a massive shift from enterprise to consumer," he said.
In the future, he predicted AI will move beyond text-based large language models as well.
"The biggest revolution is going to be video generation, photo generation and multimodal world models. I believe when these things converge, and in the future, we’re not going to be typing, we’re going to be speaking to computers," he said.
For Airbnb "collaborative" AI is key; however, the technology hasn't been designed that way.
"That is maybe the biggest flaw of consumer AI right now," Chesky said.
Airbnb is also piloting an AI interface that is more visual and conversational as opposed to a traditional chatbot.
"We haven’t developed it yet. We’re in pilot. I don’t know if we’ll be the one to do it, but I do think that that’s going to be where AI goes. It’s going to be very, very rich, very, very visual," he said.